he said... "I must say that your gift was wonderful. The time you spent, the work that went into it, that was great. I loved it." The problem was that his voice sounded funny. At the end, he added, "your gift out did mine, that is for sure."
That is what is bothering me. I feel that he feels I one upped him, and I did not want to do that. Also, he seemed to be very grateful for the 50 things that I thanked him for and didn't say much about the chocolate descriptions. That kind of embarrassed me because I think I was too mushy. Darn!! Oh well. I can't take it back now. I actually think describing each year like I did made him think of the past--mistake on my part.
Whoa!
I've put part of my post in boldface to highlight where typically our reasoning gets distorted:
You're discounting all the positives and magnifying some assumptions and taking them personally, and that's why you're experiencing those bothersome feelings.
He expressed very warm appreciation for your gift. He obviously considered the time and effort you put into it and appreciated that very much as well. Thus, his comment about your gift "outdoing" his is a compliment to you.
What it appears you're doing is this: you're putting a negative spin on his compliment. And even though you acknowledge that he seemed very grateful for the 50 things you cited, because he just did not happen to mention the chocolate descriptions, you're zeroing in on that and making an assumption of why he didn't and jumping to a conclusion about finding fault with you. You're also magnifying that negative assumption and letting it override all the appreciation he's expressing on other aspects of your gift.
You also see his writing the date on the card as his "trying to chronicle our lives together so we have it to look back on in the future", which is another assumption over a little detail that you're magnifying and completely overlooking what he wrote in the card, namely: "I'm so glad I met you 10 years ago. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you." which means so much more than his writing a date on it!
I was originally going to send him the thank you list and a Top Billboards hit CD from the year we met until my friend got me sidetracked. I should have stuck to my original plan!
Not that the chocolate idea wasn't great, and I thought it was a wonderful, thoughtful gift, BTW. I mean, I said "wow!" when I read what you created... but when we get into "should'ves", that's a trap in our thinking because unless we can predict the future, we don't really know how anything would work out, so thinking "should'ves" only serves to beat ourselves up.
